An effective project management office (or PMO) provides the organisation with a single view of its project portfolio, its project capability and capacity. It provides senior management with a view of how its investment is being managed, and the programme and project management community with a source of intelligence about the conduct of project processes and delivery.
Though projects are transient structures and are difficult for Boards to deal with, by implementing an effective project management office this problem is reduced, with typical departmental reporting to the Board once again being available.
Why is it worthwhile?
The steady and strong rise of PMOs in organisations across all sectors of business and government is a powerful demonstration of the value of PMOs. However, many organisations have also seen the steady erosion of value from their investment in PMOs as their role has been reduced to low level admin, which arises whenever the PMO fails to address the real needs of its different stakeholder groups.
What will you experience
The work begins by working with the demand side (the senior managers) and the supply side (the project managers) to establish what the need is, and how it can be satisfied. The PMO is then designed to deliver those things rather than developing a PMO ‘out of the box’ – an approach that satisfies few of an organisation’s requirements.
Techniques and tools, practices and procedures and then customised to deliver the design, PMO staff are profiled and developed to build their capability so as to deliver to the programme and project management communities expectations.
How you might start
A common approach is for CITI to put in a small team to establish the PMO design and to start gaining control of the project portfolio in terms of reporting against benchmark values. While this is going on a credibility is being built the in-house team is brought in and shadowed until they are confidently running the PMO, and the CITI team act as experts and coaches in the background.
Our approach to business case studies would typically involve the use of the following tools and models:
We support the development of project-based workshops and provide experts to create business cases, and then using our Reflect-Learn-Apply approach embed the knowledge, skills and attitudes into the organisation.
